Friday, January 9, 2015

Weekly Wrap Up! 1st Week of 2015

Howdy!! I know have been MIA for over 6 months (well except the super brief, 2 day, attempt at daily posting in November...what was I thinking?). To be honest, it has been a mixture of not knowing where my head is, to not having 2 hands to type with, and not feeling like I had anything worth posting about!

But, we are back, with REAL Montessori (or at least Montessori inspired) schooling. Last semester we used workbooks and curriculum. So, we are finishing up on those and transitioning into more Montessori lessons again. I'm ready!

We started out this year with a new theme for our calendar. We use the Calendar Connections from 1+1+1=1, and we are using the cards that focus on the Arctic and Antarctic. Seems about right, since the high yesterday was all of like 4 degrees, and the windchill was below zero ALL.DAY.LONG.

Our discussions have included ice, glaciers, icebergs, and polar lights. We've also talked about latitude and longitude, hemispheres, and the arctic circle.

And I was thrilled when Mini Cooper, completely on her own, went and found a journal and wanted to draw pictures and copy the names so she could remember her work!!

We had a refresher course with our Little People animals and the Article and Noun presentation. I also presented Grammar Box 2 (which I see I have no photos of).

Working through Grammar List 1. We enjoyed the discussion of what some of the words meant. We even watched a Youtube video of a wringer to learn what that was!

Explorer completely enjoyed getting to work on the Continent puzzle. We also sang the Continent song, which she loved. We used this to talk about where Antarctica was at.

Mini Cooper had a really fun day when she spelled her first word!! She is certainly at a language sensitive period. Always wanting to know how to spell things and write them down. She had no idea it would be possible that she could spell her own word!

When we started pulling out the Montessori Materials, it apparently brought inspiration to the sensorial materials. The girls spent a lot of time building together this week.

For Christmas, Charger got this super cool Snap Circuts set! We will be working on this a lot!

We made the fan fly! Super cool!

We learned about how ice melts by using a fun experiment I found from Art and Creativity. First, we sprinkled it with salt, and then we put food coloring on it.

You could then watch the salt make tunnels through the ice as we watched the food coloring go through the tunnels.

The kids spent a good hour watching their ice cubes melt, adding food coloring, and experimenting. Mustang was adding salt to get hers to melt faster and even pulled out a magnifying glass so she could get a better look. Very fun experiment.

One last little fun activity the big kids have been doing is to play the Oregon Trail. This was a flashback for me and we've all been enjoying trying to get to Oregon without having our oxen stolen, our friends die, or to get sick from dysentery. Lots of strategizing, planing, and discussion has come from this game!

All in all, it's been a great week back! I hope yours was as well! See you next week :).